So the Tribune editorial board is fed up with the “news of scandal” (“All scandal, all the time,” Editorial, Jan. 18) that has dominated the Clinton administration thus far?
Last time I checked, the news media–and not the administration–were the agenda-setters responsible for reporting the news out of Washington.
Scandals–present in any administration that I can remember–have only achieved “elevator music” status in the post-Watergate era. A more careful consideration of Professor Larry Sabato’s work would have illustrated this. He does not concentrate on modern-day politicians and their lack of ethics. Rather, he examines the media’s “feeding frenzy,” with their full-time focus on controversy in this “age of attack journalism.”
As such, the media now portray our government leaders as guilty until proven innocent, as evidenced by the Tribune’s editorial, which classified several unproven, and maybe even false, allegations as scandal.
People like Paula Jones and Kenneth Starr would be nowhere without the mass media’s hunger for scandal–and that’s the most telling comment of all.
